Robot Arm Making a Cup of Coffee

Firstly you will need a Robot Arm, we used one from LynxMotion, but there are also good arms from CrustCrawler or Trossen Robotics.

You will need some software to control your arm and we used Flowbotics Studio (FlowArm) from DSPRobotics, which allows you to record each position required to move the arm and sequence it for you using Inverse Kinematics (IK).

And finally you will need a modified tea spoon to spoon the coffee we did this by heating up a plastic spoon and twisting it to make it easier for the robot to hold.

Finally to program it we moved the arm using the Flowbotics Studio software and recorded each step, then once happy let it run and enjoyed our coffee.

cool, it would be awesome to see more of an explanation of the interface. are there present function you were working with (stir, scoop, etc) or did you have to manually enter in a bunch of coordinates?

The way it works is your drag the onscreen version of the arm to the desired location, which in turn moves the real arm, and then store this position. We had to do this for each key location. Once recorded you can then change the time for each frame to get the speed just right etc. plus save and load the sequences etc.

You can download a free version of the Flowbotics Studio from our DSPRobotics site: Flowbotics Studio

We have also supplied the FlowStone source code if you want to dig deeper.